THE Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) will, in the future, be benefitting from “Nothing to Declare” scanners which will enable persons to walk through with their bags which will be scanned.

This is according to Commissioner General of the tax body, Godfrey Statia, during a press briefing on Friday at GRA’s headquarters Camp Street, Georgetown.

He said this deal was made during a recent visit to China, which was fruitful as arrangements were made with the Chinese customs agency.
“We are trying to facilitate persons and improve their interaction and service with the GRA; we have looked at all the taxation changes and updates in the budget. This will result in Chinese experts visiting Guyana to assist GRA,” he said.

Additionally, he said scanning operations have recommenced and at the end of the second quarter, GRA will have a new scanner at the Guyana National Industrial Company Inc. (GNIC) area, which will offer 3D scanning.

OIL AND GAS OPERATIONS
Statia said that GRA has procured an expert to handle the tax side of the oil and gas operations.

“We have been able to procure the services of an expert who was in charge of the Canadian Revenue Authority oil and gas operations. He will be here for the next two years and would be in charge of building that capacity based on what we would have had from the Large Tax Payers Unit (LTU),” he said.

He also said that GRA has also shortlisted five of 14 accounting firms to do the analysis on the oil and gas operations.

Moreover, he said that GRA has been receiving information requested from ExxonMobil on a quarterly basis and based on that, the authority would be able to estimate the returns along with various other issues.

He said that the GRA and the Auditor General’s Department will work along with the accounting firms in order to provide training and to give experience that may be lacking to assist with future development.

The commissioner general noted that training of staff will be ramped up for the oil and gas sector, especially in petroleum accounting.

For 2019, he said the ICT modernisation and automation will continue in GRA and a firm has been identified to develop the systems needed.

“The firm has done well in the Bahamas and Barbados, we still feel we are different than those countries and as such we need to make some changes…. We will be signing the ICT modernisation next week. We launched limited services in 2018, and in 2019 it will be more robust,” the GRA Head said.

He said with the digitalised data, anyone can walk into a GRA office in their district and receive the same service being offered at the GRA headquarters.
During 2019, he said there will also be executive staff changes in order to provide more efficient operations.

“We will continue with staff rotations and improvements. For the first time in 18 years we have been able to put into place a performance appraisals system, whereby employees will be appraised and that appraisal will be able to give them their increments,” he said.
Further, he said GRA will now be grading companies and brokers that are not complying with new systems being implemented, something which government institutions have also been guilty of.

“We cannot tell the health minister, the army and the police that we are not clearing their goods; they are partly responsible for the backlog we have, even though we have written them no one has moved in the right direction, so half of the time GRA gets blamed but we are not responsible,” Statia explained.

Aiming for a World Customs Organisation standards, the commissioner general said the GRA wants to have consistent treatment of all stakeholders.

In the weeks ahead, he said, GRA will be sending a team to India for courses on accessing valuation databases of many countries, which would assist in under and over invoicing of items being brought into the country.